Azores

An archipelago of nine Atlantic Ocean islands that lie at 39°43' west longitude and 39°55' north latitude and that became a crucial stop for European vessels heading to the Western Hemisphere.

The Azores sit atop a volcanic ocean chain in the eastern Atlantic. Centuries of geological action have given the islands remarkably fertile soil. In addition, a number of the islands have flat, well-watered coastal plains making them an excellent location for agriculture. Their more northerly location meant that the climate was cooler than other Atlantic islands such as Cape Verde.

The discovery of the Azores is shrouded in mystery. Although texts from as early as the 11th century refer to islands somewhere in the Atlantic west of the Iberian Peninsula, it is unclear whether such assertions were based on knowledge, speculation, or pure fantasy. What is clear is that the Azores lay within a Portuguese zone of navigation, a status that was formalized by the Treaty of Tordesillas. Their importance to the Portuguese Crown can be gauged by reference to contemporary maps that portray the islands well out of proportion. Even given the imaginative nature of mapmaking at the time, such a representation illustrated the importance of the islands to the sailors of the day.

Despite their position well out into the Atlantic, Portuguese possession of the islands did not translate into using them as a springboard for western exploration. The Portuguese preferred instead to utilize some of the islands as mid-Atlantic refueling points for their West Africa trade routes. To this end they stocked them with cattle, sheep, and goats, knowing that the absence of a native population or indigenous carnivores would ensure the survival of the herds and flocks when the caravels returned from West Africa. The first permanent settlers arrived in the 1440s, and the islands initially proved an attractive destination. By the mid-17th century the population had grown so much that the islands became a significant recruiting ground for the Portuguese military. Despite this demographic success, the islanders never discovered an ideal crop to cultivate. The climate was too cool for sugar, the crop that produced the most wealth for 16th-century Europeans. Although residents of the Azores did develop a credible export industry based on wheat and dye-plants, neither produced much capital. Most of the grain went to Portugal, while the dye was the objective of a hotly contested, if brief, competition between English and Dutch linen manufacturers. In addition to these modest export industries, the islanders also developed their own linen manufacturing as well as a moderately successful fishing industry.

Although the islands never produced the great wealth of colonies such as Brazil, their fertility made them selfsufficient while the continuation of their original role as a way station kept most of them within the flow of navigation. Certainly Christopher Columbus was aware of their existence, and the Azorean island of Santa Maria was his first landfall on his voyage back from the Americas in 1493, although his crew was arrested by the island’s authorities when they made landfall and Columbus had to negotiate their release. The large numbers of bureaucrats, troops, and members of religious orders on the islands hampered the growth of prosperity on the Azores. The efforts of both Jesuit and Franciscan monasteries and colleges on the Azores added to the islands’ prestige, but the inhabitants of these institutions constituted 10 percent of the population in some areas, thus putting a burden on the farmers and fishermen who had to support them.

Further reading: C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne E'mpire 1415-1825 (New York: Knopf, 1969); Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); T. Bentley Duncan, Atlantic Islands: Madeira, the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands in Seventeenth Century Commerce and Navigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).

—John Grigg